Caption: Detailed view of the communities (sub-groups of patients and the SNPs driving their disease) identified by precisionlife in a population of patients with schizophrenia, which is a very highly heterogenous disease. To download this image, click here. 

PrecisionLife has confirmed it is extending its relationships with some of the largest COVID-19 collaborative research projects and is now offering free use of its unique analytics platform and support from its data and biomedical science teams to the on-going collaborative efforts of the medical research community in the fight against COVID-19 coronavirus.

The precisionlife platform can analyse large scale, complex multi-omic and epidemiological data to generate disease insights that are not possible with current tools. It is routinely used to analyse very large anonymised patient datasets (>100,000 patients) and with detailed insights into complex diseases returned within hours.

The platform can be used to help:

• Identify the complex genetic factors associated with patients’ different disease severity and outcomes
• Understanding risk factors such as smoking, gender, ethnicity, blood group and underlying health conditions
• Developing tests to identify whether people are at high- / low-risk for serious forms of the disease
• Informing the hunt for existing drugs that will be effective for given patient sub-groups, especially those at risk of late-stage disease
• Identification of novel drugs targets especially for more serious late-stage disease

To be effective, the precisionlife tools require data from a minimum of several hundred COVID-19 patients, ideally including genotype/whole genome sequence with additional data including disease severity, co-morbidities, and epidemiological/phenotype information such as blood group, smoking, gender, ethnicity etc. The methods work hypothesis-free and do not require training.

The precisionlife platform has been validated on over 20 complex disease studies and with disease specialists, development partners and in pre-clinical assays/models. Several of these studies have focused on respiratory and immune response/auto-immune diseases.

PrecisionLife believes that its tools will be particularly helpful in analyzing the COVID-19 patient datasets currently being generated, and would welcome approaches from relevant parties, both in the UK and further afield.

For more information, please see www.precisionlife.com.

PrecisionLife Ltd started in 2015, built on a shared vision to bring a new level of analytical capability to computational biology, genomic medicine and healthcare. Its precisionlife platform is built on over 30 years’ experience in delivering new technologies and products to enable the discovery of richer and more useful links between patients, disease, targets and drugs.

Headquartered in the UK, precisionlife also has operations in the US, Denmark and Poland.